Fwd: [rest-discuss] service "definition" techniques
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Barry Norton
Dec 1, 2011, 4:17:19 PM12/1/11
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From: Erik Wilde <dr...@berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [rest-discuss] service "definition" techniques
To: rest-d...@yahoogroups.com
Cc: Carlos Eberhardt <carlos.e...@gmail.com>, Gary Frankel <gary.f...@emc.com>
On 2011-11-30 21:08 , Carlos Eberhardt wrote:
> Is anyone using something like WADL for service definition documentation? We're (hopefully) going to have a collection of many services in multiple domains and we'll be expected to have a standard 'template' for defining/documenting a service. I'm curious if anyone in an "enterprise" situation has run into that and has any advice.
definitely not off-topic! this is a problem that a lot of people are
struggling with (including us right now). at times, there is some
general pushback to "describe" things because that might encourage
developers to hardcode things, especially things such as URI patterns
that they shouldn't hardcode. so "descriptions" putting URI patterns on
top always look a little unfortunate, in the end these things probably
have been designed for generating the server side, and not so much for
guiding client-side developers. but in the end, if you have services,
you want internal/external people to find them, in particular if you're
serious about SOA and have a lot of them [1].
there have been individual efforts to come up with a language, off the
top of my head in addition to WADL i can list our own approach ReLL [2],
RESTdesc [3], and SA-REST [4]. they all take a little different
approaches and all of them have been discussed controversially. in the
end, the main question is what you need the registry for, and what
things you cannot so by runtime discovery. we're currently struggling
with that, too, and i am pretty confident that we want to have some
developer resources made accessible somewhere, such as
tools/examples/contacts/schemas. in the end, my guess is it comes down
to documenting representations and link relations, and this can be done
by namespacing all these things and then using a mechanism for
describing namespaces [5]. i think there still is room in this space for
something to become established and easily usable so that it is useful
across SOA domains, but as long as things are (services to their
descriptions) linked, it's nicely RESTful even if everybody does what
fits their needs best.
cheers,
dret.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876
[2] http://dret.net/netdret/publications#ala10a
[3] http://restdesc.org/
[4] http://www.w3.org/Submission/SA-REST/
[5] http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil06h
--
erik wilde | mailto:dr...@berkeley.edu - tel:+1-510-2061079 |
| UC Berkeley - School of Information (ISchool) |
| http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |
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From: Erik Wilde <dr...@berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 4:26 PM
Subject: Re: [rest-discuss] service "definition" techniques
To: rest-d...@yahoogroups.com
Cc: Carlos Eberhardt <carlos.e...@gmail.com>, Gary Frankel <gary.f...@emc.com>
hello carlos.
On 2011-11-30 21:08 , Carlos Eberhardt wrote:
> Is anyone using something like WADL for service definition documentation? We're (hopefully) going to have a collection of many services in multiple domains and we'll be expected to have a standard 'template' for defining/documenting a service. I'm curious if anyone in an "enterprise" situation has run into that and has any advice.
struggling with (including us right now). at times, there is some
general pushback to "describe" things because that might encourage
developers to hardcode things, especially things such as URI patterns
that they shouldn't hardcode. so "descriptions" putting URI patterns on
top always look a little unfortunate, in the end these things probably
have been designed for generating the server side, and not so much for
guiding client-side developers. but in the end, if you have services,
you want internal/external people to find them, in particular if you're
serious about SOA and have a lot of them [1].
there have been individual efforts to come up with a language, off the
top of my head in addition to WADL i can list our own approach ReLL [2],
RESTdesc [3], and SA-REST [4]. they all take a little different
approaches and all of them have been discussed controversially. in the
end, the main question is what you need the registry for, and what
things you cannot so by runtime discovery. we're currently struggling
with that, too, and i am pretty confident that we want to have some
developer resources made accessible somewhere, such as
tools/examples/contacts/schemas. in the end, my guess is it comes down
to documenting representations and link relations, and this can be done
by namespacing all these things and then using a mechanism for
describing namespaces [5]. i think there still is room in this space for
something to become established and easily usable so that it is useful
across SOA domains, but as long as things are (services to their
descriptions) linked, it's nicely RESTful even if everybody does what
fits their needs best.
cheers,
dret.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876
[2] http://dret.net/netdret/publications#ala10a
[3] http://restdesc.org/
[4] http://www.w3.org/Submission/SA-REST/
[5] http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil06h
--
erik wilde | mailto:dr...@berkeley.edu - tel:+1-510-2061079 |
| UC Berkeley - School of Information (ISchool) |
| http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |
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